Oh, The Metahumanity! (Apr 25-28)

Mon, 05/02/2016 - 14:47 — Bryan Lambert

We're four episodes away from three season finales and three episodes away from a fourth. My free time will be happy when all four of these shows are done, but I'll be happiest when one particular show finishes. We all know which one.

Agents of SHIELD: "The Singularity" (15% Stupid)

I'm not sure I'm a big fan of the whole messianic fervor among the Inhumans thing. I mean, it makes sense, and it makes for good stories, and they're using it well, but I don't necessarily enjoy watching it, if you know what I mean.

Most of the dumb stuff in the episode was deliberate and called out and explained - Coulson going into the field on crutches, some of the excessive Fitz-Simmons stuff, so I'm fine with it. And some good Coulson-May stuff, plus SHIELD HAND. And next week, we get actual for-real Kree, apparently, which will probably set up Daisy's space vision and the whole season finale. Oh, also, um, they destroyed Hydra. Well, they cut off it's head, which by all accounts isn't supposed to work, but I wonder if that's a Civil War thing so that nobody will go into Civil War thinking they're fighing each other because Hydra.

The Flash: "Back To Normal" (10% Stupid)

This is one of the lowest Stupid scores Flash has gotten (or would have gotten had I been doing it) all season, and most of it is just Killer Frost acting, and then they killed Killer Frost, which means no more Killer Frost acting, so I knocked a few percentage points off for that. But all around a surprisingly solid "consequences of preceding actions" episode, and even though we all know the Get The Powers Back plan is going to work, it was presented with enough insanely dangeous gravitas by Wells that it sold it for me.

Arrow: "Canary Cry" (10% Stupid)

This episode was almost entirely the fallout from the death of Laurel Lance, including the very natural, logical attempts by her father to bring her back from the dead, since he's had one daughter presumed dead and then later actually dead and then later brought back from the dead. This works for both Quentin and the audience, who, assuming Laurel's death is permanent, needs to be told that outright.

We also have the Fake Canary storyline, which is weak, but sets up the ending where Oliver reveals to the world that Laurel was the Canary. I've wondered this before, but with this reveal, an anti-vigilante mayor who will soon be shown to be Totally Evil, and the widespread knowledge of everyone's identities by everyone at this point, could we be leading up to the classic Green Arrow trope of him not hiding his identity and being beloved by Star City?

The biggest drawback here? The flasbacks. Any time a show goes back, this time to various points in the show's early seasons, and shows you scenes that it decided happened but didn't show you back then, it can mess with the show's timeline. That first one with the Tommy's Death Guilt thing especially kind of makes you wonder why it took Laurel as long as she did to figure out Oliver was The Arrow.

Legends of Tomorrow: "Leviathan" (40% Stupid)

Hey, legends of Tomorrow> Kill Brainwashed Hawkman. He'll reincarnate. Then kill Savage. Then time travel forward 30 or so years, find reincarnated Carter Hall, problem solved. Assuming the problem was that Carter Hall was dead, which I haven't seen as a problem since it happened.

Which is a goddamned shame, because as a season finale, Hawkgirl smashing Vandal Savage's head in with a magic mace and rejecting Savage's attempts to emotionally manipulate her because (a) she's a badass and (b) she's banging The Atom now would have been great. Instead, we get two more episodes of fuckaroundery and further confirmation that this is the WORST HAWKGIRL EVER.

Also, Leviathan seems like s stupid fucking weapon for Vandal Savage to come up with. He strikes me as a more ruthless, practical guy than a "giant glowing robot that somehow nobody knows about even though he's been using it and you can see it for miles" kind of guy. We all know why Vandal Savage had a giant humanoid robot. The showrunners wanted an excuse to Giant-Man Ray. s for Snart turning Savage's daughter against him, Wentworth Miller's acting saved that whole plotline, but man, what a tired fucking trope.

See, that's the kind of comic-book dumb I'm fine with. I mean, they probably should have established why he can't figure out how to do it all the time, on account of it being useful, but shrinky thing can also be growy thing is an established part of both comic book tropes and penis biology.

I mean, if the show were built entirely around how white dwarf matrices worked, and this was in clear contradiction to everything else that had been said about white dwarf matrices, that'd be more up Legends of Tomorrow's alley.